The ZTE Chorus ($49.99) is just weird. It's based on Android, but it's not a smartphone. It supports Cricket's Muve Music service, but audio quality is poor. It has touch screen that isn't responsive, terribly short battery life, and a back cover you can pry off just by looking at it. You get unlimited talk, text, data, and music for $55 per month, but for just $10 more, you can get all of that on a bonafide smartphone that will run scores of apps. The ZTE Chorus is interesting, to be certain, but that's about all it has going for it.

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Design, Call Quality, and Plan PricingThe Chorus measures 4.4 by 2.3 by 0.6 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.7 ounces. It's comfortable to hold, but a little thick. The phone is made entirely of shiny, smudge-prone black plastic, with a silver band separating the back from the front. The 3.2-inch plastic touch screen sports 240-by-400-pixel resolution. It gets bright enough, but text and other details look jagged. The bigger problem is responsiveness. It's a resistive screen, so touch doesn't register as easily as it does on a capacitive part. I often had to repeat swipes or taps a number of times before they would work. And typing is a nightmare due to the tiny onscreen keyboard and that resistive screen. There are two equally unresponsive touch keys beneath the display, as well as a physical button that opens up Muve.

The Chorus is a triband EV-DO Rev A (850/1700/1900 MHz) device with no Wi-Fi. Cricket uses its own network in about a third of the country, and Sprint's network in the rest. Reception on Sprint's network where I tested in New York was iffy, and voice quality just mediocre. Volume is low in the earpiece, yet voices sound fuzzy and distorted the higher you raise it. Calls made with the phone sound muffled, like you're talking into a pillow, and background noise cancellation is poor. Calls sounded better through a Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars) but voice dialing didn't work at all. The speakerphone is loud enough to use outside, but voices sound harsh. Battery life was dismal at just 3 hours and 4 minutes of talk time.

Cricket offers a single plan for the Chorus that includes unlimited talk, text, data, and music from Muve for $55 per month. That's a significant step up from its other feature phones plans, which start at $35 (though that's just for unlimited talk and text). MetroPCS recently started offering a similar plan where $60 per month will get you unlimited talk, text, and Web, along with unlimited music via Rhapsody. (Without Rhapsody, that plan costs $50.) Those prices are more affordable than all the major carriers, but still more expensive than Boost Mobile's $55 per month smartphone plan, which can actually reduce to $40 per month as you pay your bills on time. You don't get unlimited music with Boost, though.

The problem is, for $65 per month, you can get the same Muve Music plan on a genuine smartphone, like the ZTE Score ($69.99, 3 stars). Though strictly midrange, a smartphone like the Score opens up a whole new world of possibilities and features the Chorus can't touch.

OS and MultimediaLike the Motorola i886 for Sprint ($99.99, 3.5 stars), the ZTE Chorus is a feature phone that runs on Android. Exactly what version of Android that is, I don't know. I poked around in the Settings menu, but couldn't find any clues that give away what's going on beneath the hood. It shouldn't really matter, because the Chorus is being sold as a feature phone.

Traces of Android abound, though. There's a full HTML Android Web browser, which is a pleasant upgrade from the less capable browsers found on many other feature phones. But there's no Android Market, so you can't use the plethora of apps designed for Android smartphones. There's a Cricket Storefront app, but it's more like a standard feature phone app store.

Oddly, there's also no built-in email support, which is one of Android's strongest features, though you can access it within the browser. There are three home screens you can swipe between, though I couldn't tell if the lack of responsiveness was from the resistive touch screen or the phone's 600MHz processor.

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Alex Colon is the managing editor of PCMag's consumer electronics team. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in English Writing and Literature from Pace University and got his start editing books before deciding technology would probably be a lot more fun.
Though he does the majority of his reading and writing on various digital displays, Alex still loves to sit down and read a good, old-fashioned, paper and ink book in his free time. (Not that there's anything wrong with ebook readers.)
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